Funeral

Dad's funeral was on Friday. I was dreading it because I didn't think I'd be able to hold myself together, and the fact that I was in tears before the service had even started didn't bode well, but it wasn't as awful as I'd thought it was going to be. It was non-religious because Dad was never religious (in fact we'd often have discussions over the dinner table about topics such as religion and the afterlife and he always said that he couldn't imagine anything being better than the life he had here, which is just another reason why it feels so unfair to me that he didn't get to live longer.) And it was a woodland burial, which is what he wanted.

We then all gathered in a pub where I talked to a load of people who told me they haven't seen me since I was a small child, including my godfather, a gaggle of first cousins once removed, and people dad worked with. I didn't have a hope of remembering all their names or most of what was said to me, but I think that's understandable.

Although there was one woman who said I must remember her. When I said I didn't she went on about how I went to her house once as a child and went walking over the fields with her daughter and when I said that sounded vaguely familiar she smiled and left without actually telling me who she was. (I pointed her out to Mum a bit later and apparently she was Wendy, wife of Rodney who used to work with Dad.)

Paul was there too cos I'd asked him to come to the funeral with me, and it was such a huge help having him there. I just hope it wasn't too weird for him.

Saturday would have been Dad's 66th birthday so we ordered pizza and those cheesy jalapeno bites he always a huge fan of. I think he would have liked that.

I wish there were magic words I could use to take this pain away for you, but there just aren't. I can say that little things, like you ordering the jalapeno bites, do help balance the grief in my experience. I think that's the most you can aim for right now -- just to balance things somewhat & stay afloat, so to speak.

That's not going to change, based on my experience. I still have to remind myself that it's normal too -- that fluctuation from day to day or even week to week or month to month. Grief seems to keep unfolding as time passes, and you never know what emotion might come up next, let alone when.